HandoutSelling out or buying in? Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock hawks the product for one of his movie's sponsors, Mane 'n Tail shampoo, in "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold."

“The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” sells itself as a movie about advertising, how it works, its pervasiveness, whether it’s effective. Yet beneath that sheen, it’s a film about filmmaking, a self-aware meta-documentary about making a self-aware meta-documentary.

FILM REVIEW

’The Greatest Movie Ever Sold’

2.5 out of 4 stars

Rated: PG-13 for some language, sexual material

Director: Morgan Spurlock
Run time: 90 minutes

Honestly, it does neither of these things very well, but director/star Morgan Spurlock wrestles his topics with the genial, humorous, everyman tone we’ve come to appreciate from the guy who stuffed himself with Big Macs for “Super Size Me.”

Here, he chronicles his efforts to fund “Greatest Movie” entirely with advertising dollars, and ends up sipping fruit juice, wearing shoes, using hotel rooms, driving cars, etc., from prominent companies who agree to cough up a few bucks. We see the brands so often throughout the film, I absolutely don’t feel obligated to name them.

I’ll make one exception: Mane ‘n Tail, a shampoo for humans and horses. He pulls the bottle off the drugstore shelf and turns it into an amusing running gag, with the company’s cooperation, as it became an official sponsor of the film. Go to the Mane ‘n Tail website, and there’s Spurlock’s grinning, handlebar-mustached face, surely under contractual obligation, hawking the product with a bemused smirk.

As he makes the film, Spurlock follows several scattered narrative threads. Worried about being sued if his examination of product marketing comes to a negative conclusion, he visits a lawyer. He brings his camera into boardrooms, where he pitches his idea to ad execs.

Sponsors pile up, and so do the contracts, one of which boasts a clause that the film will not disparage the entire country of Germany. He wonders if he’ll be able to keep a final cut of the film.

Social pundits, such as Ralph Nader and Noam Chomsky, discuss the effects of advertising on society. Spurlock also sits down with Hollywood film directors to discuss product placement — Brett Ratner gives a pragmatic answer, and Quentin Tarantino doesn’t contribute much to the topic, but bumps the movie’s coolness factor up a notch. One product-placement guru says he wields enough influence to change a movie’s script.

More piquant are three of Spurlock’s tangents: One, faced with pleasing his sponsors with market saturation, he purchases embarrassingly inexpensive advertising space from a high school that keeps getting its funding cut. He interviews students, many of whom agree they shouldn’t be bombarded with commercials in school.

Two, he visits the sprawling urban metropolis of Sao Paolo, Brazil, which recently banned public advertising — no billboards, no telephone-pole flyers, nothing. He interviews lawmakers and people on the street, who say their minds are less cluttered now, and merchants, who don’t seem too put out for having to change the way they sell things.

And three, he visits consultants, who barrage him with questions to determine what the Morgan Spurlock “brand” is. The result is “mindful-playful” — hammer, meet nail head.
It’s the perfect descriptor for “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold,” which finds Spurlock batting around ideas like a kitten with a toy. He’s entertaining, for sure, and more immediately sincere than his clear influence, Michael Moore.

But “mindful-playful” doesn’t necessarily imply insight in this case.

The tagline for the film is “He’s not selling out, he’s buying in,” semantic hair-splitting that is never fully explored or explained; the two-word conclusion at which he arrives come film’s end is disappointing.

By making a film about the film he’s making, Spurlock takes a risk, from the onset not knowing what his precise focus will be. The result is a well-meaning, often funny, essay that benefits from its creator’s ability to occasionally layer irony and sarcasm in his commentary, but he never really hones in on his topic.